In a Chaotic Age, Shopping on Pinduoduo with Ten Yuan a Day

The Song Dynasty is weak and crumbling: Jurchen blades shatter the realm, and iron cavalry tramples the palaces. Qing horsemen swarm like locusts, while Mongol sabers glint beneath the cold moon. Natural and man-made disasters follow one another without end. Drought demons scour the land for a thousand miles, floodwaters swallow vast stretches of farmland, and disease stalks the living like a ghost. Corpses litter the roads for miles, and people trade their children for food. Salt and iron cost more than gold, and a bowl of coarse rice can buy a life. Refugees struggle like weeds amid gunfire and famine, while despair hangs thicker than the night.

Lin Yi transmigrates into this living hell, only to wake beside a pot of boiling water and discover that he is about to be cooked as “two-legged mutton.” A fallen female general risks her life to save him, and the two escape in a bloody struggle. At the brink of death, he binds himself to the Pinduoduo Multiplication System. Its workings are wondrous: every person he converts into a believer increases his daily shopping allowance by ten yuan. The allowance accumulates day by day, letting him buy anything from 9.9-yuan cold medicine to a 199-yuan stab-resistant vest, and from an 899-yuan drone to a Wuling Hongguang. Lin Yi presents medical alcohol and instant noodles as “treasures of the immortals,” claims to be a disciple of Zhang Jiao, the Great Sage and Teacher, and tricks the gravely wounded female general into becoming his first believer. The one thing never in short supply during chaotic times is refugees kneeling in the dirt, waiting to die. He opens his purse, and they flock to him like whales sucking in water. His followers multiply like a snowball, and his daily allowance rises right along with them.

He trades small goods for weapons and provisions, uses drones to survey enemy camps, and launches surprise attacks a hundred miles away in off-road vehicles, building a heavily armed “Pinduoduo Army.” He conquers city after city, breaks the Jurchen khan’s camp, and drives the Qing cavalry south. Once a soul doomed to die beneath someone else’s blade, he is now a mighty ruler with an army at his command. Smoke curls from the camp kitchens, his people bow before him, and the cool, aloof female general at his side gazes at him for a long while before finally asking the question that has been circling in her mind: “Are you really an immortal?”